solutions:
Key Impacts
- Fastest, most heavily trafficked Olympics’ site ever— 276 million page views over 17 days
- 100% availability for all users who visited – no downtime
- Included 6 separate interactive Web applications
- Averaged less than 3 seconds per page download
- Limited access of restricted video clips to authorized users
- Reduced IT costs; eliminated need for 500 servers
When NBC got exclusive U.S. rights to broadcast the 2004 Olympics, they also gave the growing broadband audience something to cheer about. By working with Akamai, they delivered the fastest, most heavily-trafficked Olympics Web site ever – complete with streaming video of pre-game highlights and interviews, interactive polls and email-a-friend applications, and near-real-time event results. Authorized viewers had access to exclusive, rights-protected content. NBC customized content to regional affiliates’ specifications, and was able to monitor traffic across the site and track all visitor activities.
Instead of building out the 500+ servers that would have been required to support the short-term Olympics Website and all of its special elements, NBC used our global platform and managed services. In addition to saving a bundle on equipment, using Akamai’s high-performance platform helped them deliver average page download times of under three seconds, and the first 100% available Olympics site in history – not a single instance of downtime.
"To know that Akamai can deliver any content—even if it’s interactive and personalized— quickly and reliably to a large audience made them the obvious choice. But on top of that, they provided functionality such as geographic and bandwidth verification technology that enabled NBC to distribute its content in creative ways."
—Dave Abbott, CTO of Internet Broadcasting (IB)
